Marcellus A. Stovall was born at Sparta, (Hancock county) Georgia on September 18, 1818.  He was the son of Pleasant Stovall, a successful merchant in Augusta, Georgia.  M. A. Stovall was educated at Wesleyan Academy [later Wilbraham & Monson],Wilbraham, Massachusetts.  In 1835 he returned to Georgia to enlist, at age 17, in the Richmond Blues, Augusta, Georgia, for service in the Seminole Wars.  In 1836 he entered the U. S. Military Academy at West Point but left because, as one obituary noted, he "was compelled to return to the South on account of rheumatism contracted in the uncongenial latitude of a Northern clime."  From West Point he toured Europe in 1839 before returning to Augusta, Georgia, where he was active in business and volunteer military companies including captaincy of the Clinch Rifles. In 1842, he married Sarah G. McKinne of Augusta. In 1846 he moved to Floyd County, Georgia, where he was in business and captain of the Cherokee Volunteer Artillery.  At the outbreak of war he volunteered for service to the State of Georgia.  He was made a colonel of artillery assigned to the 2nd Brigade, Georgia Volunteers and on October 8, 1861 made lieutenant colonel of the 3rd Georgia Battalion and assigned at Richmond, Virginia. He saw duty at Lynchburg, Va., Goldsboro, N. C., and East Tennessee. His first engagement was at Waldren's Ridge in 1862 from where he accompanied General Kirby Smith into Kentucky. Following the Kentucky Campaign he received assignment to General Braxton Bragg and participated in the Battle of Murfreesboro.  For "splendid work" he was promoted to brigadier general on January 20, 1863.  He was also assigned to the First Brigade of Breckinridge's Division, D. H. Hill's Corps, Army of Tennessee.  While here he commanded the First and Third Florida Regiments, the Fourth Florida, Forty-Seventh Georgia and the Sixtieth North Carolina in a battle at Jackson, Mississippi.    He surrendered with General Johnston at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1865. He returned to Augusta and continued his cotton business and civic life.  He served as a city alderman, first police commissioner, and was active in the Confederate Survivors Association. In 1878 he was married again to Courtney Augusta Peck, and on August 4, 1895 died at the age of 77 of a "critical illness."

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